If costs are incurred equally, the implication is that Morgan Stanley will be paying out severance packages of around $125k (£83k) per head.

Needless to say, this is unlikely to be the case. Of Morgan Stanley’s 1,200 layoffs, 470 people are in sales and trading and 730 are in infrastructure and support. No prizes for guessing where the biggest packages will be paid…

Separately, investment banks have very minimal interest in hearing from newly minted MBAs who fancy a career in sales and trading. We know this thanks to a new report from Barclays Investment Bank, which included the chart below. It suggests the number of associate roles in sales and trading has fallen by 70% in the past five years.

Source: Barclays

Meanwhile:

Alistair Darling, ex-Chancellor of the British Exchequer, is off to become a director at Morgan Stanley. (BBC)

William Blair is prowling about, looking for new talent in London. (Financial News)

The badness of Jesse Litvak: ‘He traded residential mortgage-backed securities, and he would tell buyers of those securities inventive little stories about the prices he had paid for them.’ (BloombergView)